Of Truths and Loves

Love is a space which temporalises itself; it is time which spaces itself. It cannot be anything else, writes Soumabrata Chatterjee.

Let’s start with rudimentary questions and basic assumptions. What is love? What does it have to do with anything that Kindle as a magazine may represent? It is not politico-cultural or eco-political or any of those rude-sounding hyphenated words that push you to rediscover the limits of your sanity. In fact, it can be argued that it is quite opposite to sanity. As poets have blown it out of imaginable proportions, love is the domain of the irrational, of the indomitable, of the teary-eyed and rose-petal-laden hearts and heaving bosoms crying for the beloved.

Or maybe, just maybe, love is as evil and as political as other things are. Things we tend to sweep under the rug to keep safe from children and other perils of irresponsible adulthood. Or maybe love is utterly useless.

When we think of love, or attempt to define it, we always do so in terms of establishing a synonymity with some other unknown object. Love is trust, love is friendship, love is remembrance, love is pain—from Shahrukh Khan to Osho, from Neruda to Chetan Bhagat or Ravinder Singh, everyone has an opinion about love. But that opinion is qualified by other markers. It seems love itself is empty of anything; it has a hollow at its centre, which needs to be filled by these emotions of jealousy, friendship, remembrance, sweetness and many others.

Love as a concept seems to be defined by the “other”. It is a theoretical vacuum that needs a defined boundary; its volatility and amorphous nature derives from this quality of engulfing anything around it.

Love as a concept seems to be defined by the “other”. It is a theoretical vacuum that needs a defined boundary; its volatility and amorphous nature derives from this quality of engulfing anything around it. Love can be anything. Love can be when Shahrukh Khan played the obsessive lover in Darr; love can also be the self-sacrificing heroes of Bollywood. Love can be the sanskari nari in Rajshri productions bowing to Hindu culture and heritage. On the other hand, love can also be violent and pernicious as in Dev.D. The basic imperative in forming this dialogue is that love is a bottomless, rudderless, directionless word which truly stands for differential understanding, since Heer Ranjha and Romeo Juliet change to our Ishaqzaade or Ram Leela very easily.

So then, love in its very nature is connected to culture and cannot as a matter of fact be anything other than flexible. The question then arises that if culture is transitional and translational, why isn’t love the same? Why, in our society and culture, do we still hold on to age-old concepts of marriage being the culmination of love that is “true”? Why does our society have a problem with non-normative forms of love or their sexual expression? Why does our society invoke similar modes of loving a person?

And what is “true” love anyway? Recently, a friend emphatically stated that her love is true because it has sustained hardships, while others are not because they have not. Now, I might be okay with terming it as a more successful relationship, but how can any love claim truth-value? If there are different love-s and different truths, then how does one love? How does one mode of love get to be legitimately designated as true, while others are cheap imitations or outright false?

How can any love claim truth-value? If there are different love-s and different truths, then how does one love? How does one mode of love get to be legitimately designated as true, while others are cheap imitations or outright false?

What astonishes me is the modality through which this argument posits its supremacy. Love with a person A develops because I chose her, or the other way around. I chose her out of other possible Bs, Cs, Ds. So the basic claim of supremacy should always be open to radical possibilities—of breaking up, of love meeting other love-s or other forms of desire, of love dying out.

This is the problem with narcissism and self-preservation too. Any philosophy or structure of thought which does not recognise the “other” is bound to fail simply because it will be invaded by other events as it attempts to forge its way through variant discourses. Love is always understandable and appreciable in translation, in a process, and can never be studied in its own, because its basic character is of referentiality. I love somebody, I love myself—the object of my love always dictates the mode of my love. It’s never top-down, it always mediates itself through another person. Activity, object and it is this mediation that determines the nature and extent of love.

Then if love is so intangible and imperfect, how can there be one established, proven way of loving my nation? Who decides which way of loving is untrue, or wrong, or unsuccessful? Where does this arrogance produce itself?

Love is always understandable and appreciable in translation, in a process, and can never be studied in its own, because its basic character is of referentiality. I love somebody, I love myself—the object of my love always dictates the mode of my love.

As I write, I remember that Rohith Vemula has been dead for quite some time now. His movement and the movements that followed him have all been termed antinational for some weird sense. Anupam Kher comes on public platforms talking about the absence of intolerance and Akshay Kumar talks about patriotism in the wake of his horribly nationalist film Airlift. Why should there be a Hindu way of loving a Hindu nation which loves a certain deified form of Hindu naari full of sanskar and bullshit (sorry, cowshit)?

The reason behind writing this boring line is to see how many ‘love’-s can be there in a line and the absurd situation where all of them derive from the same ideology. See, I am not even suggesting that this absurdity can be a possibility. Love can never be unilateral, unipolar, or monochromatic. It cannot be. It has be multiple, polysemic and transformable.

How dare they question the patriotism of somebody based on how they love and accept their own country? This is actually the problem with censoring books too. How can somebody decide the truthicity of the loyalty of Rushdie towards his own homeland and his religion? If his love and appreciation is personal and intimate, how can it be only positive or on the brighter side? Or how do we expect monological love from Agha Shahid Ali or Taslima Nasrin? They love, curse, appreciate, and embrace their objects of love in their own way. I cannot love my country in the same way as a Gujarati, a Marwari, a Punjabi will do. As culture travels, love does too. People at the helm of organisations should realise this simple fact of life.

It is in that moment of prolonged space, where time spaces itself, where time is stretched to the brim, where life is drunk to the lees, that love exists. It is a secret bond, an agreement which demands same responsibility from all the partners involved.

Grow up you imbeciles!

Coming back to love and its various questions, I am reminded of a story I heard some time back. Some details are fuzzy, but I will try to construct it in all earnestness. So there was this old guy who wanted to write a poem but never could complete it. Somehow or the other he got involved in some deep shit and got a death penalty as punishment. While he was facing the firing squad, in that prolonged moment of waiting for death, when death was almost at his face, almost at the edges, he finished his poem. It is in that moment of prolonged space, where time spaces itself, where time is stretched to the brim, where life is drunk to the lees, that love exists. It is a secret bond, an agreement which demands same responsibility from all the partners involved. It is a space which temporalises itself; it is time which spaces itself. It cannot be anything else.